UPDATE 4-U.S. FCC commissioners support open Internet rule | Deals | Regulatory News | Reuters
The vote came despite a flurry of lobbying against the net neutrality rule by telecommunications service providers like AT&T Inc (T.N), Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and Qwest Communications International Inc (Q.N), which say it would strip them of the ability to manage their networks effectively and would stifle innovation and competition.
The rule would prevent operators from discriminating against any legal content a third party wants to deliver to consumers on their networks, though it allows for “reasonable” network management to unclog congestion, clear viruses and spam, and block unlawful content like child pornography or the transfer of pirated content.
I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to this. Do any of my readers who do have knowledgeable takes on the issues want to enlighten me?
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This is a tough one, Bill. Neither side is clearly right or wrong.
If we looked at it in classic libertarian terms, the conclusion would be against Net Neutrality, because it stifles the ability of carriers (ISPs such as Comcast and AT&T) to offer various tiers of service to both end users and content suppliers. That is to say, it interferes with their ability to innovate.
However, this ignores the fact that those carriers are at best oligopolies and in some areas de facto monopolies (mostly because of government strictures on who can become a carrier). The classic libertarian case assumes that if a carrier does something to abuse its end users, then it would suffer competitively. In the oligopoly/monopoly case, that’s not true.
Given the lack of competition, it’s certainly a possibility for carriers to do “rent-seeking” by charging large content providers (such as Google) extra money just to deliver their content at appropriate levels of service. For instance, they could structure bandwidth levels for content providers in such a way that the “free” level isn’t good enough for a YouTube or Hulu to operate, and then blandly point out that the content provider can pay a fee to get a better level of service.
However, this is hypothetical, because up to now no carrier has done it (at least as far as I know). Google et. al. are supporting Net Neutrality as a pre-emptive strike to prevent such rent-seeking on the part of carriers from being permitted at any point in the future.
Given that it doesn’t really change the current structure much, and mostly just prevents alteration of the status quo in certain areas concerning pricing and service, the direct damage from Net Neutrality looks minimal in the short term. In the long term, it could possibly be a barrier to certain types of innovation.
I’m not sympathetic to either side. The carriers certainly don’t give anyone warm and fuzzy feelings, but I don’t like Google’s dark side either.
Another option would be to refrain from passing Net Neutrality now, but hold it over the head of the carriers for some indefinite term if they start trying to rent-seek. That one avoids the problems above, but I don’t much like the government having that kind of ability to hold punishment over the heads of the private sector, at the whim of the current passel of crooks in Congress.
Sorry I can’t offer a clear recommendation. If I were in Congress, I’d probably vote for a Net Neutrality bill if it had an expiration of, say, ten years. If it didn’t… I don’t know.
Glenn Beck opined against net neutrality in his 21 Oct show, claiming it is a ruse for the Fed Gov to gain control over the intartoobs. His case may be more detailed than my summary.
Just sayin’.
You might want to read Ray Niles’ article on this in the Objective Standard: “Net Neutrality: Toward a Stupid Internet”.
I don’t know much about it. But after what I read on Gizmodo today, I think I’m for it. Because McStain is against it:
“He’s introduced the ‘Internet Freedom Act’, which would block the FCC’s rulemaking process. He says the rules would create ‘onerous federal regulation’, and constitute a ‘government takeover’ that would stifle innovation.
“‘Today I’m pleased to introduce the Internet Freedom Act of 2009 that will keep the Internet free from government control and regulation,’ McCain said. ‘It will allow for continued innovation that will in turn create more high-paying jobs for the millions of Americans who are out of work or seeking new employment. Keeping businesses free from oppressive regulations is the best stimulus for the current economy.’
“I’m trying to keep politics out of this, but apparently his view of ‘Internet Freedom’ refers to big business freedom, not Joe public (or Joe the plummer). It’s strange, because I always thought that thriving competition was the best way to boost jobs and protect us consumers. Apparently not.
“Lest we forget: Mac or PC? ‘Neither, I am an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.’ His words, not mine. Even if you don’t agree with the FCC, is this really the right guy to oppose them?”
http://tinyurl.com/mcstain
Who decides when the carriers have crossed the line and are rent-seeking? The only solution to problems caused by government-imposed barriers to entry is to remove those barriers, not to start throwing more regulations at the business entities that government is protecting.
It’s tough to say. At the widest possible interpretation (and I’m setting a straw man up here; I’d hope no sane person would propose this, but some cleverdick lawyer would), ISPs wouldn’t be able to filter spam.
At a level below that would be filtering malicious network code (identifying zombie boxes and blocking their traffic, for example). It’s clearly in everyone’s interest that this is done, but you could argue that a carrier who is legally barred from discriminating based on the type of traffic would have no ability to do this.
The next layer down is where most of the action is, these days. This is stuff the ISP wants to filter because it eats up tons of bandwidth - these days, mostly Bittorrent packets. On the one hand, the vast majority of them are carrying illegal content (pirated movies, pirated games, pirated you name it). On the other hand, not all of ‘em are; there are perfectly legitimate uses for BT as well. Comcast has been performing some technical assholery with BT connections (mostly sending out forged “end the connection” packets). Of course, this kind of crap is just begging for modifications to the protocol that would (a) ensure that open connections stay open, and (b) take up even more of Comcast’s bandwidth…
Sure, there’s a theoretical level where Comcast blocks Hulu ’cause they want you to watch their cable network, but nobody’s gone down that road yet. Nor do they want to - provoke the Google, and they just might decide to build a fiber network to the door of every house in America, -just to spite you-.
If only that could happen. It can’t, given the present state of things.
I agree, that’s the real solution. But I don’t expect state and municipal government to give up their control over carriers in our lifetimes. They’ve got some cushy arrangements with them.
Who the fuck can know. In an environment defined by governemnt enforced barriers to entry, how the hell can we guess what the effect of a very technical ruleset (that will probably never really be any bill) can be.
“there’s a theoretical level where Comcast blocks Hulu ’cause they want you to watch their cable network,”
or block such services as Vonage or Skype, because those services look kinda like Bittorrent and consume bandwidth like BT does. When you suddenly see 64k small packets per second sliced out of your network’s upstream . . .
They’ve done it, but undid it rather quickly as soon as they were informed that they were blocking a legitimate service. It doesn’t help that this legitimate service is competing against one of theirs, running on the same IP stream. If I were a cable operator, I would have taken the hit on RF bandwidth and moved all the VOIP to its own frequency pair.